Parabola

Your best single target attack chain is jawbreaker->clobber->shatter if you can get the recharge together to pull it off. That may allow you to save slots in single target powers you eventually won't be using. I like to put just a couple of winter ios into another low level attack so I've got it for exemping and the slow resist is always nice. Shatter doubling up in both the single target and aoe attack chains is hugely efficient in terms of slots. That power is a bit more understated than clobber or crowd control but it's a real star of the set.

I believe the answer to the second part is that those procs don't actually fire before the slick is lit. My understanding of the mechanics is that oil slick arrow consists of two seperate pseudopets, one the unlit patch and the other the lit one. I think the lit patch completely replaces the unlit one so they aren't present at the same time. Procs will only work in pseudopets using the relevant enhancement categories. The unlit patch does knockdown, slow and defence debuff but no damage so both the Positron's blast and bombardment procs can't fire in the unlit phase. The lit patch continues to do the knockdown and defence debuff so procs like touch of lady grey continue to work through the whole thing.

Yeah really don't drop crowd control. It's a huge cone and it does massive damage. I swear I've seen it hit people behind me! It's the perfect power for a force feedback proc too. Rad/mace is a bit of an embarrassment of aoe riches though. I'd drop whirling mace or ground zero before crowd control. You could also decide that you didn't need radiation therapy as a proc bomb but that somehow feels like sacrilege! Shatter is also too good to drop. Hits hard enough to justify being used in the single target chain and with the tanks arc increase it can hit a lot of bad guys.

Not on my pc so can't open the build but just eyeballing it have a couple of comments: I'm not sure what the 5 slot bonus on unbreakable guard is but I generally stop at 4. You can use the spare slots for impervium armour psi res pieces to build that up. Also I like to slot the steadfast protection +def into the same power as the unbreakable guard +hp piece (so res, res/end, res/end/rech, +hp and steadfast +def). The res on the steadfast fills in for the missing bit. You really aren't likely to need all that end. I've recently been playing a rad/dark and with just the panacea in health and performance shifter procs in stamina and gamma boost, and the theft proc in rad therapy, it's completely impossible to run out of end. I'd drop conserve power for focused accuracy or head for another epic entirely. You can free up the extra slots out of health and stamina for other things too. I'd also want more recharge in ground zero. It stays at 90% proc rate with a load of recharge in it. I like 5 pieces of Armageddon (all but the pure damage) and an extra proc. I'm not all that familiar with rad melee so will let someone else comment on that side of the build. I highly recommend heading over to one of the test servers and build your character there though. You can play with the incarnates and slotting and see how the build actually works in play. I haven't made a build yet that hasn't performed very differently to the way I imagined when it only existed in mids!

I'm wondering if this is simply an accolade you get for completing various story arcs throughout the game. Something to encourage more content to be run. Bit like task force commander but for a load of story arcs that probably aren't currently connected to badges.

Ff+rech is way more reliable in aoes. I've generally found it very disappointing in single target attacks. It also tends to work better on proc builds where you aren't going to have many recharge bonuses. On a more normal build you may as well keep stacking the recharge bonuses and ff+rech can get a bit lost in the noise.

A lower fx option for icicles would be nice. They are phenomenally ugly when you've taken the low fx option for your other armours. I may as well add that frozen fists desperately need a low fx option too. I have a soft spot for ice armour as my first 50 on live was an ice tank. Ice is fantastic at keeping aggro but just feels like it is missing a little something. The fire hole isn't too much of a problem but the psi hole becomes very apparent late game. It's not all that easy to patch on a mainly defence based set due to limited opportunities to slot impervium armour. Hoarfrost is good without being amazing, icicles is a little hamstrung by weak damage of a very resisted kind and permafrost is one of those little powers that I always begrudge taking because why on earth is there so much cold resist?! I like hibernate, I view it as a more useful self revive because you don't need to retoggle. Energy absorption is great, by the time you get it you are generally crying out for it to fix endurance problems and it can add decent defence in a group. If I could have any changes I liked I might look at upping the damage on icicles (along with the aforemention fx option) and changing permafrost to give less cold resist but perhaps adding some psi resist? I'm wondering if I might prefer a version of hoarfrost that had less max hp but more heal on a lower cooldown. Or maybe absorb might be the way to go? It's not a bad power at all but I feel ice needs just a bit more survivability.

Yeah this is it. Annoying isn't the same as challenging. I'm firmly in the 'there are balance issues at the high end' camp but not being able to find hostages is not some game balancing factor, it's simply tedious.

I was looking at elec/traps for my next controller (sidetracked by half a dozen other things though). My thinking was that both like melee, it should be safe enough, elec can be draining while you are laying down traps, and toebombing should work pretty well. I like the theme too.

Probably scrapper for me. I'm one of those that can't imagine playing a set that has no aoe at all so that rules out the stalker. And the main draw of MA on a tank is the +def bonus which you really don't need on SR, particularly at tank modifiers. You'd hit some very impressive numbers but ultimately it would be overkill.

Bottom of his posts. Unless you are on mobile in which case they don't show up.

I think numerically gfs is pretty strong, far better than the ice version. I just don't get on with its animation, far too ponderous and I feel it breaks the flow of the set. I take an inferior attack chain to have a smoother one on my fire melee (but it is a scrapper in case there are numerical differences).

I think Basilisk's Gaze is in that category with Cloud Senses and a couple of others in that they are lower level but still very sought after. The supply is limited due to them being below the normal ranges used for bulk conversion and so the price stays high.

Yes, it's random within the categories; set, type or rarity. The only restrictions are that you wil never convert to the same io you started with (in one conversion, if you convert again though you may end up back where you started). Also if you convert within type (pbaoe, hold, etc.) you will always convert out of the set you started from.

Well, sort of. In the same way if you farmed until your eyes bled, set fire to the inf and sold all your drops for 1inf you would deflate the market regardless of whether you were earning inf at twice the rate or not. But this sort of activity isn't how anyone actually interacts with the market. The market relies on an influx of goods that needs to be balanced against the overall buying power of the consumers. If the ratio of that buying power to the available goods rises then inflation is the inevitable result. The economic principles simply are what they are computer game or not. You can choose to not believe this but that doesn't make it less true. Yes there is indeed no central bank. We are all engaged in printing our own money as we go about our in game activities. No-one is paying us from a central reserve, the inf literally appears out of thin air. Luckily we are also creating goods out of thin air too and the hope is that between those and the market fees things are overall kept roughly in check. That balance is all this change is trying to maintain.

My trading in lotg was actually in the three most commonly used pieces, not just the proc. I've seen prices drop for all of them. But as someone once said the plural of anecdote is not data, we just have to leave this one to the devs. I believe both in their good intentions and the economic principles they are following, but I appreciate not everyone is seeing it that way.

This has never been stated by the devs although it has been repeated ad infinitum by those unhappy with the change. The intent of the change was never to address wealth inequality, it was to address the problem that earning extra inf was unbalancing the ratio of inf to drops that was being added to the market. There are multiple posts in this massive thread where the economics of this have been explained but the very short version is that wealth doesn't drive inflation, pumping extra inf into the system does. This is completely contrary to what I've seen. I know for a fact things like lotg have gone down in price because I have been trading in them before and after the change. For a while I was left in the position of having stock that was suddenly grossly overpriced. But, as the above poster says, this is just my anecdote. The devs will have access to much more reliable data than any of us and they seem happy the change has worked as intended.

Good work @Galaxy Brain, interesting results all round. It looks like the top performers are the sets that are fairly self contained in both single target and aoe which makes sense. It would be interesting to see the effect of allowing the secondary to fill in the gaps. Some of the lesser performing sets would really benefit and may catch up a bit. Elec blast really loves a good hard hitting single target attack or two from the secondary for example, likewise psi and aoe.

Ah right yes of course; completely untyped damage. Presumably they go straight through defences too unless they happen to be stamped with vectors?

The other thing about pure defence that often gets left out of discussions is that enemies exist that punch right through it with autohit attacks or massive tohit buffing. This is a serious problem that no amount of ddr can help with. I'm not sure the equivalent exists for resistance? I don't think anything simply ignores it? I used to firmly believe that defence was the better protection because of the avoidance of debuffs inherent in it but now I've realised the value in simply having broad resistance hard caps. It helps that the mostly pure resistance sets tend to have built in debuff protection and this can be built upon with things like focused accuracy and ageless radial.

A null the gull option of some kind sounds good to me. Something that occurred to me in a previous version of this thread was to have a 'kd until dead' option. With this selected mobs would kd unless the attack was enough to kill (arrest) them, in which case the full kb would apply. Would allow the finishing blow to send them flying in a satisfying way without any irritation prior to that. People are very defensive about knockback and I understand that. But positioning is a big thing in this game, there aren't all that many tactical elements in it but positioning is definitely one. Patch powers and aoes of all kinds dictate that bunched up and static mobs are easier to defeat. For melee characters this is compounded, their aoes prefer bunched enemies and even their single target attacks need them to be right next to the enemy. It can maybe be argued that people should be less sensitive about having to chase after knocked enemies when on melee characters, but you cannot argue that having to do so isn't less efficient than attacking a static enemy. The same applies to aoes and patch powers. You could say 'so we killed them a bit slower because they were blown out of the tar patch, so what', and fair enough if that isn't a problem for you but it is a problem for other people. In particular the person who carefully positioned the tar patch in the first place and has seen their contribution to the fight lessened directly by the actions of another player. Knockback can of course be used without annoying anyone (to a greater or lesser extent). I consider myself pretty good with a storm for example which was one of my favourite sets back on live and barring accidents can generally herd fairly well. But unfortunately in the course of general play I see knockback used badly more often than well. And this isn't always the fault of the player; powers that do inconsistent knockback, particularly radial knockback pbaoes, are very difficult to work with. The addition of the kb->kd io's was a tacit acknowledgement that knockback isn't always desirable and a global option seems to me to be the logical next step.

Overall my biggest gripe with dominators is they are too reliant on being high level. This is both because of how much better they become when built for permadom and how much they get from their epic powers. In particular the epics fill in aoe where the secondarys can often be stuffed full of single target with only mismatched aoe options. I don't know what I'd do about domination but there must be a way of making the balance between the low and high level gameplay better. For the secondarys I would strongly consider throwing out the cottage rule and rebuilding them to at least work better with themselves. No more tiny narrow cone and pbaoe combinations. I think I've seen someone discussing the idea of swapping powers between the secondarys and the epics to even out the progression and that sounds a decent idea to me where it would work.

Just to echo previous comments. Opportunity needs a rework, containment needs to at least work on more mez types, domination could do with being less all or nothing, and scourge really needs to be a lot more impactful in a wider range of scenarios.

Being a hold it procs out very nicely which helps single target dps. Having said which I've generally felt that dual pistols just feels a bit slow with it's single target attacks. Not necessarily a numbers thing but simply a feel thing. I'm not sure whether it's each individual animation or the way they maybe don't flow together quite right but the whole thing seems slightly stop start. I love the animations in general so it's not that I have a problem with the whole gun fu thing, I just wish it felt a touch faster.

Sure. It could probably be optimised further but this is it as it stands. Built for damage rather than out and out toughness.